Why Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton split

LONDON — When movie director Tim Burton and British actress Helena Bonham Carter separated last week, after 13 years together, it was attributed to him suffering a “mid-life crisis” — which tends to be the routine code for “having found a younger woman”. If so, the couple’s admirers will be outraged: Since when did this pair do anything routine?

Their eccentricities were not only charming, but also provided a plausible explanation of what kept them together. For 13 years, they worked together, enlivened the social landscape together, collected lots of awards together and seemed to do everything one might expect of a devoted, modern couple — except live together. Famously, they inhabited separate-but-conjoined houses in north London, scuttling through a chandeliered tunnel when they needed to see each other and keeping a prudent distance when they didn’t.

To Carter, it all made perfect sense, and the more details she supplied of their domestic arrangements, the harder it was to argue. “My house looks like something out of Beatrix Potter,” she said, “but if you go over to his house, you’re in a totally different place. He’s got slime balls and dead Oompa-Loompas lying around, and skeletons and weird alien lights. It’s like going from the land of the living to the land of the dead.”

There was the added complication of their nocturnal preferences. Burton is an insomniac who likes to do his thinking at night and sleep at less propitious times. Such as when Carter is up and about and hungry for a chat. Which, itself, is a problem, as she talks non-stop and he says almost nothing. “He’s actually very shy,” she once said. “I used to say that he was a home for abandoned sentences.”

It is true that Burton, 56, gives the impression of having his most interesting conversations with himself. And what conversations they must be! Talking, earlier this month, about his much-praised new film, Big Eyes — the true-life story of American art fraudster Walter Keane — he said: “Fantasy and reality are quite blurred for me. What some people find normal, I find abnormal, and what they find abnormal, I’m thinking, ummm, yeah, I’ve experienced that.”

A genteel life in leafy Hampstead with Carter was about as normal as Burton was likely to get. She may have played some odd parts and look as though she is permanently in costume, but she owes much to a reassuringly solid, upper-middle-class background, and was possessed of a good enough mind to see that behind Burton’s strangeness was the raw material for a worthwhile relationship.

Burton had grown up in Burbank, California, where his favourite childhood game was staging axe murders on the family lawn. He later told a biographer that life then was “a visually wonderful, hellish place. When you are a kid, you think everything is strange. Then, when you get older, you realise that it is strange.”

Their romance was slow to take off for other reasons, notably Burton’s engagement to Lisa Marie Presley, but love won through and they found themselves living in bohemian bliss in London. Just as she accommodated his oddness, he seemed to soothe her insecurities. Carter had come into acting almost by accident and, despite her early success, suffered cruelly from the sense that she wasn’t really good enough for it. For much of the ’80s, she lived in corsets and bonnets, rattling off period dramas, particularly in the Ismail Merchant and James Ivory productions.

She finally broke free from type with a nude scene in Wings Of A Dove, a 1997 film adaptation of the Henry James novel, and embellished her notoriety by having a fling with Kenneth Branagh, which reportedly ended his marriage to Emma Thompson. In recent years, she has worked most successfully in collaboration with Burton in films such as Sweeney Todd and Alice In Wonderland.

Within days of the announcement that they had separated, they were seen out and about with their children, Billy, 11, and Nell, seven, looking a picture of normality. Could it be that the simple life they had built together was more than they could handle? AGENCIES